A Yelp for online learning?

By eCampus News staff and wire reports

November 8th, 2013

It’s that time again when colleges and universities report their admissions statistics, graduation rates and other numbers, and groups compile and analyze those statistics to rank our nation’s top higher education institutions, The Huffington Post reports.

Many students rely on these rankings to help them determine which schools will best fit their needs and where to spend their application fee dollars.

These days, however, students practically need professional advisors just to help them make sense of the college rankings — more organizations are getting into the ranking business and the way they judge schools is becoming more complex. For many years, rankings focused on the academic quality of the institution, such as the famous, but often criticized, U.S. News and World Reportcollege rankings.

Now there is a growing number of rankings focusing on the “value” or “return on investment” a college or university has. Forbes, for example, is more interested in how well they fare after graduation. Some rankings are based on strictly monetary factors like tuition and salaries (Washington Monthly’s “Best Bang for the Buck” scores), others on how well the schools prepare students to enter certain lucrative career tracks.

What all of these college rankings are ignoring or missing is that much of it, if not the most important learning takes place off a college campus.

Whether entering the business sector after graduating from college or joining a law firm after finishing law school, how to actually do those jobs is often learned onsite. Your college diploma may get you in the door, it is not the best indicator of how well you’ll perform or the salary you’ll earn over a lifetime.